


cut me open, look right through

by foreignconstellations



Series: learn my lesson, lead me home [2]
Category: The Pacific - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-20
Updated: 2013-01-20
Packaged: 2017-11-26 04:58:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/646813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foreignconstellations/pseuds/foreignconstellations
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing is, he tries not to think about Sledge too much. If he does, it’s mostly memories – the first time Sledge accepted a cigarette, the way he smiled when Snafu first called him ‘Sledgehammer’, about feeling Sledge’s skin under his fingertips. Little things, things without too much pain attached to them. Things he can separate from the dirt, and the maggots, and the death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cut me open, look right through

**Author's Note:**

> title is from 'split me wide open' by the bravery
> 
> this is the snafu pov companion to 'fill in the holes you've made', and i'd recommend you read that first

Snafu never let himself think he’d make it back home, but once he is, he adjusts well enough. The streets are just the same, and he slides in amongst the piles of trash and the muddy puddles as if he never left. He uses the money from the few gold Jap teeth he’d managed to hang onto to get himself a shitty little apartment, finds himself a shitty little job in a lumberyard. He makes enough money to buy cigarettes and enough food to eat almost every day, and he could almost pretend he’d never been to war.

It’s the people that make it hard. Snafu doesn’t know what they see, maybe something in the set of his shoulders, or a look in his eyes, but people seem to know when they look at him that he’s seen things that’d send most men running (and done a few, too). The men he works with make his hands itch for a rifle – not one of them bothered to fight, not _one_ , and they think they have the _right_ to ask him all sorts of stupid questions (Snafu looks at them like he used to look at replacements, and they eventually stop asking).

No girl will touch him. The knife-edge smiles and honeyed words that worked without fail before now just earn him a smile and a shake of a pretty head, or sometimes a slap (that stings less than the pitying refusals). He wonders if it’s because they can see it on him, the mark that Sledge left.

* * *

 

 _(He’d gotten too close. At some point amongst the rocks and the dust, this_ boy _had become something worth fighting for, worth_ feeling _for, and before he knew it, he was babbling about bad germs and telling him his real name and saying ‘I’m sorry’ over the death of a dog (a fucking_ dog _, when he’d seen human bodies piled high and never said a word._

 _He’d gotten too close, and it was frightening, but so was everything else, then. It didn’t seem to matter as much, when any day he could take a bullet to the head. But then the war was over, and there were endless roads of possibility before him, and it was too much. It was too much and too close, so he ran.)_  

* * *

 

The thing is, he tries not to think about Sledge too much. If he does, it’s mostly memories – the first time Sledge accepted a cigarette, the way he smiled when Snafu first called him ‘Sledgehammer’, about feeling Sledge’s skin under his fingertips. Little things, things without too much pain attached to them. Things he can separate from the dirt, and the maggots, and the death.

If he thinks about Sledge as he would be now, it’s to tell himself that he’s better off now, back with his family and his best friend, being fed three meals a day, getting colour in his cheeks, meeting some pretty young girl, and forgetting all about the war. All about Snafu.

He doesn’t think about the last time he saw Sledge, pale in the lamplight, so relaxed in sleep it would be easy to believe he’d never set foot in the Pacific. He doesn’t think about the million thoughts that had flashed through his mind in that moment, of waking Sledge up with a touch on the shoulder and a whispered ‘ _Sledgehamme_ r’, about Sledge following him off the train, about a life they could carve out together through the streets of New Orleans, about pressing his lips to Sledge’s, in dark alleyways and sunlit rooms and anywhere else he can get away with it. He doesn’t think about how Sledge probably would’ve come, but he would have left soon enough, because there’s nothing in Snafu worth sticking around for.

He doesn’t think about it.

* * *

 

He doesn’t think about it, until Sledge shows up on his doorstep. The first thing Snafu thinks is that Sledge still doesn’t look better – the only colour in his face is grey, he looks like he hasn’t slept since that night on the train, and he’s _still_ too thin. And then he’s reaching out for Snafu with shaking fingers, and Snafu jerks out of his reach because he just _can’t_. “Don’t, Sledgehammer,” he says, and watches Sledge’s hand hang suspended in the air between them.

“Why?” Sledge asks, and Snafu can hear the million questions in it and doesn’t know how to answer any of them, but he tries.

“I’m not good for you,” he says, and thinks of digging gold teeth out of dead mouths, of snapping at replacements, of going cold and unfeeling in the mud of Okinawa, of how it’s too late for him, he’s lost, but Sledge has always been better than everything the war tried to make of him. 

“You don’t think I can decide that for myself?” Sledge retorts, and to tell the truth, Snafu doesn’t, because for some reason Sledge thinks Snafu has answers, is some kind of fucking role model, when he’s never done anything in his life but make things worse.

“I can’t make you better,” he says, hating that it’s true. It’s that hate, that guilt, that keeps him still when Sledge reaches for him again, keeps him still as Sledge grasps his shoulder tight (and maybe there’s a part of him that thrills at the feel of Sledge’s hand, but he doesn’t think about it).

“Please,” Sledge says. “Let me in.”

Snafu has never been able to deny Sledge anything.

* * *

 

“I don’t trust you to anymore,” Sledge snaps, and the words shake Snafu like a mortar blast.

“Then why are you even here?” he asks, because he can’t ask anything else.

Sledge pauses, and for one moment Snafu is abruptly _afraid_ , afraid that Sledge has realised he has no reason to be here, that he’s going to leave and never come back. “Because I’ve got nowhere else to go,” he says. “And because I think if I learn to trust you again, you _can_ make me better. 

Snafu stares at him, this strange Sledge with the grey face and the thin limbs and _nightmares_ , with anger and blame and too much sadness, so far from what he imagined Sledge would be like now. So far from the boy with the fiery hair that Snafu had watched scrub oil drums with a fierce intensity, not a clue about what was to come. It’s the war that’s done this to Sledge, but it was partly Snafu too. He’d do anything to make Sledge better, even if he can’t see how he could. So he says, “You’re sleeping on the couch,” and Sledge says “It’s fine,” even though it isn’t, and if he can breathe a little easier having Sledge in his line of sight again, well. He doesn’t think about it.

(Sledge looks at him like he knows, though, and it’s been so long that anyone has looked at him with any _understanding_ that Snafu almost forgets to be afraid.)

* * *

 

Snafu’s still awake, lying in the dark and the silence, when he hears noises in the next room. Even though he knows Sledge is there ( _how could he forget?_ ), he still tenses, fingers itching to grasp round a rifle. He hears the rustling, the muttering, the yelping, and he thinks, _nightmares_. He couldn’t quite believe it, before; couldn’t reconcile the Sledge that had nightmares with the Sledge that was sleeping so peacefully on that train (and maybe he just wanted to believe it wasn’t true; he knows what images are probably replaying themselves in Sledge’s sleep). But it’s irrefutable now, and part of Snafu wants to do something but he can’t think what, so he just sits and listens and hates every second, until he hears a loud _thump_ and the noises stop. He slips out of bed and moves quietly to the doorway, looking out to where Sledge is pushing himself up from the floor, tangled in his blankets, and barely visible despite the moonlight streaming through the window.

Snafu lingers in the doorway for a moment, watching Sledge, listening to him breath. He thinks about going to Sledge’s side, touching his arm lightly, finding some vaguely comforting words in the deep recesses of his heart  ( _they say dogs live, what? Seven years to every one of ours?_ ). But then he remembers _‘I don’t trust you to anymore’_ , and thinks better of it.

He goes to move quietly back into his room, but he positions his weight wrong on the ancient floorboards and there’s an audible creak that makes Sledge whirl around to face him. Snafu is frozen.

“Couch not good enough for you, Sledgehammer?” he asks, because he can’t say any of the other things in his head.

“The couch is fine,” Sledge says. And then, because he’s a polite, Alabama boy, he asks, “Did I wake you?” Snafu wants to laugh.

“No, I was already awake,” he says, easily, because it doesn’t bother him. The insomnia, the nightmares – he doesn’t like them, but he accepts them. He knows he deserves what he gets. But Sledge doesn’t. Sledge was supposed to survive, if not whole then close enough. He was supposed to forget, to be happy. But instead he’s here.

“Go back to sleep, Gene,” Snafu says, and it comes out far too soft, far too gentle, because he’s thinking about ‘you can make me better’, and that’s all he’s ever wanted to do.

Sledge asks, “You gonna stand there and watch me?” and Snafu’s been thinking about that night on the train, about nights on watch in a shared foxhole, about the way Sledge had spat the word trust at him, and thinks ‘yes’. But he says nothing (and if some part of him is reassured by having Sledge in his line of sight, he doesn’t think about it. Not yet).

* * *

 

They settle into a kind of routine, after that – one keeping watch while the other sleeps. It’s a routine the both of them are already too familiar with, and Snafu knows that it probably isn’t good for either of them. But Sledge seems to want it – he even suggests that he starts sleeping on Snafu’s bedroom floor, to make it easier (‘If you’re going to watch me sleep, might as well do it somewhere you’ll be comfortable’) – so lets it go on. 

And the thing is, Sledge starts to get better. It’s barely noticeable at first, but after he’s been there a week Snafu realises that his face is a little less grey, his limbs a little less thin (there’s always enough food for them both to eat every day, now, and dinner always on the table when he’s home from the lumberyard (and it’s not too bad) and Sledge never mentions it and it angers Snafu, a little, but he’s learned that denying a free meal is a stupid thing to do).  And Snafu doesn’t know, exactly, what is making Sledge better, whether it’s Snafu’s eyes on him in the dark or something else entirely. He doesn’t really know what Sledge gets up to while he’s at work (Sledge says he goes walking around New Orleans sometimes, exploring, and Snafu wants to know what he thinks of the city that raised him but doesn’t want to ask). But Sledge is getting better, slow but sure, and now Snafu is just waiting for that inevitable conversation, the one where Sledge tells him he’s leaving (he worries, sometimes, about waking up one day and finding Sledge simply gone, but the rational part of him knows that won’t happen. Sledge has always been a better man than him).

But it doesn’t happen. More and more weeks go by, and Sledge’s arms aren’t dramatically skinny anymore, and there’s colour in his face, and he even smiles. He still has the nightmares, though, every night, and Snafu doesn’t know how to make them go away, doesn’t think he _can_ , especially when he has them himself. But in the daylight, Sledge is better, and he hasn’t left yet, hasn’t even shown any signs that he’s thinking about it. And Snafu has long ago learned that hope is stupid and painful and futile, but he catches Sledge looking at him, sometimes, and he can’t help but think about it.

* * *

 

It’s a warm Tuesday evening when Sledge takes Snafu’s face in his hands and kisses him full on the mouth. Snafu freezes in shock, because he’s been imaging moments like this for longer than he’d care too admit, and it’s happening _now_ and out of nowhere, and it’s too much. It occurs to him that he could run, because there’s nothing in him worth sticking around for, and the pain will be worse the longer he waits. But then Sledge pulls back and that same fear of abandonment is on his face, clear as anything, and the only thing Snafu can think is that he can’t hurt Sledge again.

So he grins and says, “Thought you were never going to do that.”

Sledge laughs – actually _laughs_ – and kisses him again. Snafu kisses him back this time, and he feels Sledge smile against his mouth. He can’t help smiling back.


End file.
